Enterprise Communication functionality is well implemented in Liferay Social Office but only available within workspaces. Each “site” (workspace) natively comes with a forum and a blog. Both look rather simple but offer a lot of functionality, including access management, moderation and report of abuse. For all content, rating and commenting is enabled. One of the negative aspects of Liferay are, that only one blog is available per workspace, and personal user blogs are non-existent out of the box. However, Liferay Social Office convinces with browser based instant messaging (IM) and presence integration. Furthermore the software includes webmail via IMAP support. According to the vendor, twitter integration into user activity streams is possible.

Liferay Social Office (SO) has solid networking functionality. The users’ network is constituted of implicit (mutual workspace membership) and explicit relationships (adding a person as a friend). The two respective network activity streams are displayed both on a user’s profile and dashboard. The personal contact list displays the whole personal network or only the members of a certain workspace. Profiles contain contact information, a free-text field (“Notes”), the user’s workspaces, a project list and tags. In addition to the workspace and network activity streams, a user’s personal activity on the platform is displayed directly beside the profile, allowing other people to get a quick overview about what somebody has recently been working on. Liferay SO comes with a native presence/Instant Messaging function but lacks corporate relationship visualizations and a people/skill search.

Liferay Social Office is not well suited for Project Management. Even if workspaces provide a platform for project collaboration (Document sharing, Wiki, Blog, Forum), management and coordination of projects require too many workarounds. While blogs are integrated into workspaces by default and would have to be added with platform customization for personal use, task management has the same problem vice versa. Allowing users to assign tasks to themselves or to others without integration into workspaces does not help project management, because a centrally available task list is a basic requirement. A calendar is available within each workspace and the user can enter project milestones .However, the fact that reminders are only available for the people entering events, makes them less useful. The complete lack of advanced project management support indicates that Liferay does not attempt to cover this use case.

As of today, Liferay Social Office (SO) is only available as an on-premise solution, but a SaaS version will be offered in the first quarter of 2010. Liferay supports Jetty, Resin and Tomcat as servlet containers, along with a wide range of operating systems, application servers and databases. Due to the experience from their portal software, Liferay provides good scaling capabilities. Liferay Social Office complies with a lot of standards, supports major scripting languages and offers connectors for Documentum, Amazon S3 and Alfresco. According to the vendor, it can be integrated with JIVE SBS and Atlassian Confluence, but integration with Google Apps Professional makes more sense. The product is broadly localized (Unicode support) and offers 22 languages out of the box. Applying a special theme enables mobile access with WAP browsers.

Out of the box Liferay, Social Office supports Single Sign On (SSO) with CAS, Siteminder, OpenSSO and OpenID. Also LDAP is supported for a range of providers, including Novell, eDirectory and Microsoft’s Active Directory. Security levels and read, write and edit permissions can be flexibly defined for different user roles and content types. Administrators can set rules and enable users to individually choose access rights for their contributed content. Backup and restoration is possible, but a proper life cycle management does not exist.

Being an open-source project, Liferay can point to a large and active developer community. Besides numerous unofficial integrators and own training, consulting and support, the company relies on about 40 official service and implementation partners for both products. Liferay offers commercial support subscriptions, including three Service Level Agreements and global support from offices in Los Angeles, Brazil, Madrid, Frankfurt, India, and China. The online documentation is of good quality and the community willing to help with technical issues. Regular updates and service packs are available for the Community and Enterprise edition through subscription.